“Laws, mother!” said Miss Mela; “what you got that old thing on for? If
I’d ‘a’ known you’d ‘a’ come down in that!”
“Coonrod said it was all right, Mely,” said her mother.
Miss Mela explained to the Marches: “Mother was raised among the Dunkards, and she thinks it’s wicked to wear anything but a gray silk even for dress-up.”
“You hain’t never heared o’ the Dunkards, I reckon,” the old woman said to Mrs. March. “Some folks calls ’em the Beardy Men, because they don’t never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle was one. He raised me.”
“I guess pretty much everybody’s a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain’t a
Dunkard!”
Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to his wife: “It’s a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe — something like the Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy.”
“Aren’t they something like the Mennists?” asked Mrs. Mandel.
“They’re good people,” said the old woman, “and the world ‘d be a heap better off if there was more like ‘em.”
Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook hands with the visitors. “I am glad you found your way here,” he said to them.
Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.
“I’m sorry my father isn’t here,” said the young man to Mrs. March. “He’s never met you yet?”
“No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson.”
“Oh, I hope you don’t believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about people,” Mela cried. “He’s the greatest person for carrying on when he gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and mother gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don’t care anything more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don’t try it on much with father.”
“Your fawther ain’t ever been a perfessor,” her mother interposed; “but he’s always been a good church-goin’ man.”
“Not since we come to New York,” retorted the girl.
“He’s been all broke up since he come to New York,” said the old woman, with an aggrieved look.
Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. “Have you heard any of our great New
York preachers yet, Mrs. March?”
“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.
“There are a great many things here,” said Conrad, “to take your thoughts off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I think the city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time.”
“I don’t know that I understand you,” said March.
Mela answered for him. “Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go. I’d about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don’t see a bit o’ difference. He’s the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest.” She laughed for enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.
Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which the talk was always assuming. “Have you been to the fall exhibition?” she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she seemed sunk in.
“The exhibition?” She looked at Mrs. Mandel.
“The pictures of the Academy, you know,” Mrs. Mandel explained. “Where I wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on.”
“No; we haven’t been yet. Is it good?” She had turned to Mrs. March again.
“I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But there are some good pictures.”
“I don’t believe I care much about pictures,” said Christine. “I don’t understand them.”
“Ah, that’s no excuse for not caring about them,” said March, lightly.
“The painters themselves don’t, half the time.”
The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing, insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister’s babble. In the light of Fulkerson’s history of the family, its origin and its ambition, he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister’s folly and an ignorant will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud — too proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife’s social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the inexperienced girl’s doubt whether to treat them with much or little respect. He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him, in her hoarse voice:
“I think it’s a shame, some of the pictur’s a body sees in the winders. They say there’s a law ag’inst them things; and if there is, I don’t understand why the police don’t take up them that paints ‘em. I hear tell, since I been here, that there’s women that goes to have pictur’s took from them that way by men painters.” The point seemed aimed at March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman’s severity: “I say they ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They’d be drummed out of town in Moffitt.”
Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: “I should think they would! And they wouldn’t anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either — not low neck the way they do here, anyway.”
“And that pack of worthless hussies,” her mother resumed, “that come out on the stage, and begun to kick.”
“Laws, mother!” the girl shouted, “I thought you said you had your eyes shut!”
All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.
“Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don’t know what they’re doin’ in all their churches, to let such things go on,” said the old woman. “It’s a sin and a shame, I think. Don’t you, Coonrod?”
A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.
“If it’s going to be company, Coonrod,” said his mother, making an effort to rise, “I reckon I better go up-stairs.”
“It’s Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” said Conrad. “He thought he might come”; and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in Fulkerson’s cheerful voice before his cheerful person.
“Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me,” those within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats, they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms akimbo.
IX.
“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches. “Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks? How you wuz?” He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce Beaton. But he would not let the shadow of Beaton’s solemnity fall upon the company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries. “I’ve brought Mr. Beaton along
to-night, and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn’t got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he’s a kind of an orphan, and we’ve just adopted him down at the office. When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh? How’s that for a little starter? We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies. My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. She’s a beauty, and I guess she’s good, too. Well, well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won’t you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything. It’s an intaglio I brought from the other side,” he explained to Mrs. March, “and I guess you’ll like to look at it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn’t, I sold it to ‘em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine’s hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs, first!”
He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painter’s words about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.
“Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her mother’s habitual address, “and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that’s right. You know you’d be roaming all over the pasture if she didn’t.”
The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him. on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.
“Oh, I think he’s just as lovely as he can live!” said Mela, as she stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others had left them after the departure of their guests.
“Who?” asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a softened fire.
She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.
“Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of yours!”
“He is proud,” assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.
Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone.
“One way is enough for me,” he explained. “When I walk up, I don’t walk down. Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. “That fellow puzzles me. I don’t know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?” he asked of March.
“Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”
“And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”
“Oh, I want to flatter him up.”
“No; really? Why? Hold on! I’ve got the change.”
Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down-town. “Three!” he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, “Why?”
“Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don’t you?”
Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.
“Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?”
“Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”
“I guess you’re partly right,” said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.
“An ideal ‘busted’?” March suggested.
“No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson. “But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasn’t conceited all the time.”
“Oh!” Mrs. March exulted, “nobody could be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst modesty, when he’d be quite flattery-proof.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. I guess that’s what makes me want to kick him.
He’s left compliments on my hands that no decent man would.”
“Oh! that’s tragical,” said March.
“Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice, “who is Mrs. Mandel?”
“Who? What do you think of her?” he rejoined. “I’ll tell you about her when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain’t it beautiful?”
They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight.
“The most beautiful thing in New York — the one always and certainly beautiful thing here,” said March; and his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.” She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near, and then pulled him back in a panic.
“Well, there ain’t really much to tell about her,” Fulkerson resumed when they were seated in the car. “She’s an invention of mine.”
“Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.
“Of course!” exclaimed her husband.
“Yes — at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, “a perfect lady. She was living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don’t mean to say her husband was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher; she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her property before they came over here. Well, she didn’t strike me like a person that could make much headway in literature. Her story was well enough, but it hadn’t much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know. I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a house—” Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, “I don’t know as I know just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?”
“Can’t you imagine?” she answered, with a kindly, smile.
“Yes; but I don’t believe I could guess how they would have struck you last summer when I first saw them. My! oh my! there was the native earth for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her before she was broken to harness.
“And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the Central Park? That was Christine. Well, I saw what they wanted. They all saw it — nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are in their right senses a good deal of the time. Well, to cut a long story short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take ’em in hand — the old lady as well as the girls. She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was just the very thing for them. She knows the world well enough to know just how much polish they can take on, and she don’t try to put on a bit more. See?”
“Yes, I can see,” said Mrs. March.
“Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and there ain’t anything readier on this planet. She runs the whole concern, sociall
y and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the old lady’s hands, and goes round with the girls. By-the-bye, I’m going to take my meals at your widow’s, March, and Conrad’s going to have his lunch there. I’m sick of browsing about.”
“Mr. March’s widow?” said his wife, looking at him with provisional severity.
“I have no widow, Isabel,” he said, “and never expect to have, till I leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance. I suppose Fulkerson means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board.”
“Oh yes. How are they getting on, I do wonder?” Mrs. March asked of
Fulkerson.
“Well, they’ve got one family to board; but it’s a small one. I guess they’ll pull through. They didn’t want to take any day boarders at first, the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it.”
“Poor things!” sighed Mrs. March. “I hope they’ll go back to the country.”
“Well, I don’t know. When you’ve once tasted New York — You wouldn’t go back to Boston, would you?”
“Instantly.”
Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.
X
Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them, and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had sent him. He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that yet. The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram out of it some way. But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal, she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might touch hers, he might pass his arm round her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that beauty, all out of drawing! They would recognize the flame quality in her. He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, whatever, from one of her native gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from it. The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it. Beaton laughed out. Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover of his first number! In black and red it would be effective; it would catch the eye from the news-stands. He made a motion to throw it on the fire, but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and smoked on. He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer which he had brought away from Fulkerson’s in the morning and slipped in there, and he took it out and looked at it. He made some criticisms in line with his pencil on it, correcting the drawing here and there, and then he respected it a little more, though he still smiled at the feminine quality — a young lady quality.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 398